Book Review: The Story of God, The Story of Us by Sean Gladding
Posted by bryanNov 1
[image coming soon!]
Paperback: 251 pages
Publisher: IVP Books (August 27, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0830836322
ISBN-13: 978-0830836321
Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
Purchase: Amazon.com
Thanks to IV Press for sending me a free review copy. Their generosity in no way effects my review.
The Story of God, the Story of Us by Sean Gladding is a very interesting book. That seems very “high school book report” of me to start out with, but the book is very unique.
Summary
To start off, the book is unique in genre. The book is essentially relaying the macro-story of the Bible, and as such it serves as a mini-biblical theology. At the core of this biblical theology is the twin themes of exile and exodus, which are the very themes I’ve been writing about in a series at ModernMarch.com (you can see the initial post here). The book is not merely a biblical theology in the sense of Goldsworthy, or even the work of Waltke and Thielman. In fact, its far from academic theology. Gladding’s book is actually narrative theology—literally the telling of the story of the bible in narrative form. The book contains twelve chapters that serve to tell the story from creation to consummation. The first eight chapters are the Old Testament, told through the stories of creation, catastrophe, covenant, community (exodus and sinai), conquest, crown, and conceit. The last four chapters are the New Testament told through the stories of Christ, cross, church, and consumation.
The format of the book is what makes the reading so engaging. The stories are told from the perspective of several key people. The stories from the Old Testament come from an elder Israelite, as he teaches a group of people the stories of Israel while in Exile. The people gather each Sabbath to hear the elder tell them the story of their people and their God. Other key players in these chapters are the musician, who leads them in the Psalms, and struggles with his anger towards the Babylonians, and an inquisitive little girl whose thoughtful questions are reflective of our own. At the end of the Old Testament section, the people are still in exile with a deep hunger for the expected Messiah to come. The New Testament section is narrated by an older woman who hosts a church in her home. She shares the story of the Bible up through the section on the church (mostly Acts, with some of Paul’s letters) to a gentile businessman who has recently started attending their daily agape feasts. In the last chapter, Consummation (the book of Revelation), we find ourselves 30 years later, and the same gentile businessman is now hosting a church in his own home.
As the story of the Bible is told, quite a bit of the narration is taken from the biblical text itself. The oddity here is the translations that Gladding has chosen to use. The Old Testament is presented using the text of the NASB, while the New Testament story is told using Eugene Peterson’s The Message.
Thoughts
Let me begin this section by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed this book. There is a lot in this book that I resonated with in my studies of biblical theologies. I was just telling a pastor friend of mine not too long ago that the biggest frustation I have with the church today is that there is a large ignorance of the story of the Bible and how it all fits together. Gladding does a good job of showing us the big picture, and how the various parts come together to tell the story.
It should be noted that Gladding and I come from two very different theological tribes. I am more reformed and complimentarian, while Gladding, it seems, is more Wesleyan, egalitarian, and seems involved with the New Monasticism movement. Even with such differences (and his views do come out from time to time), I greatly enjoyed this book and learned much from Gladding. Some from my particular tribe, however, will see these things and automatically write the book off.
As I said, these differences do come out, but some more than others. For instance, a comment made in the book that was almost “throw-away” in nature caught my eye in the chapter in creation. After going through the first creation story, the elder begins to tell the second creation story with a comment that some believe the second story to be the older story. This is definitely a reference to the documentary hypothesis theory, but nothing more is said of it and the comment was quite casual and easy to miss.
One thing that did disappoint me in this book was the translations chosen to tell the stories. The NASB is notorious for how wooden it is, and this comes out painfully clear when the musician leads the group of people in singing the Psalms. There is no rhyme or meter to any of the songs, which only served to disrupt the flow of the narrative and remove my imagination from the story. One moment, I was picturing myself among the exiles listening to the elder, the next I was quickly skimming over the psalm because how awful it sounded coming from the musician. In the New Testament, the Message was equally frustrating, but not because it was a paraphrase. In fact, the paraphrase nature of the Message lent itself quite nicely to the style. The problem with the Message is that sometimes Peterson’s paraphrase is, well, hokey. For something that tries to be contemporary, it contains a lot of phrases that no one would utter under any normal circumstance and sound just like a B-movie script.
One thing that I really liked about the book were the questions that were asked of the three main story tellers. They are question I’ve asked, and that others have asked me. For example, after talking about the conquest of Canaan, the little girl asked why God would command the slaughter of so many people. The old man replies, “I don’t know” before giving her answers that “others” have thought. Usually, the answers given to these questions reflect the best answers we can give, but the “I don’t know”s echo with us. We have answers, but ultimately, we can only go on what is revealed to us. But in each, you can hear and feel, and even identify, with the struggle, awe, and eventually hope, that swirl inside both those who ask the questions, and those who answer them.
In the end, I found The Story of God, the Story of Us to be a good, fun read that wonderfully explains the story of the Bible. Despite some differences here and there, the book was a nice break from the usual “academic” volumes I’m used to and gave a breath of fresh air. Sure, a lot of people who tend to line up with me in some theological aspects will skip over this book because of certain issues, but in many cases this is unfortunate. For other cases, however, this is for the best, because they’ll allow those differences to speak much more loudly than they ought, and drown out the beauty of the rest of the story.
, I mentioned that Longman briefly discusses his view on the book of Job—namely that he views it as book of historical fiction with a theological purpose. In that review, I stated that I disagreed with Longman’s view. Today, blogger friend Jeff at Scripture Zealot posted a short post on why he believes 
